The all-sweeping besom of societarian reformation -- your only modern Alcides club to rid the time of its abuses -- is uplift with many-handed sway to extirpate the last fluttering tatters of the bugbear Mendicity from the metropolis. Scrips, wallets, bags -- staves, dogs, and crutches -- the whole mendit fraternity with all their baggage are fast posting out of the purlieus of this eleventh persecution. From the crowded crossing, from the ers of streets and turnings of allies, the parting Genius of Beggary is "with sighi."
I do not approve of this wholesale going to work, this imperti crusado, or bellum ad exterminationem, proclaimed against a species. Muight be sucked from these Beggars.
They were the oldest and the honourablest form of pauperism. Their appeals were to our on nature; less revolting to an ingenuous mind than to be a suppliant to the particular humours or caprice of any fellow-creature, or set of fellow-creatures, parochial or societarian. Theirs were the only rates uninvidious in the levy, ungrudged in the assessment.
There was a dignity springing from the very depth of their desolation; as to be naked is to be so muearer to the being a man, than to go in livery.
The greatest spirits have felt this in their reverses; and when Dionysius from king turned saster, do we feel any thing towards him but pt? Could Vandyke have made a picture of him, swaying a ferula for a sceptre, which would have affected our minds with the same heroic pity, the same passionate admiration, with which we regard his Belisarius begging for an obolum? Would the moral have been mraceful, more pathetic?
The Blind Beggar in the legend -- the father of pretty Bessy -- whose story doggrel rhymes and ale-house signs ot so degrade nor attenuate, but that some sparks of a lustrous spirit will shihrough the disguisements -- this noble Earl of wall (as indeed he was) and memorable sport of fortune, fleeing from the unjust sentence of his liege lord, stript of all, aed on the fl green of Bethnal, with his more fresh and springing daughter by his side, illumining his rags and his beggary -- would the child and parent have cut a better figure, doing the honours of a ter, or expiating their fallen dition upohree-foot eminence of some sempstering shop-board?
In tale or history ygar is ever the just antipode to your King. The poets and romancical writers (as dear Margaret Newcastle would call them) when they would most sharply and feelingly paint a reverse of fortune, op till they have brought down their hero in good ears and the wallet. The depth of the dest illustrates the height he falls from. There is no medium which be preseo the imagination without offehere is no breaking the fall. Lear, thrown from his palace, must divest him of his garments, till he answer "mere nature;" and Cresseid, fallen from a princes love, must extend her pale arms, pale with other whitehan of beauty, supplig lazar alms with bell and clap-dish.
The Lu wits khis very well; and, with a verse policy, when they would express s of greatness without the pity, they show us an Alexander in the shades cobbling shoes, or a Semiramis getting up foul linen.
How would it sound in song, that a great monarch had deed his affes upon the daughter of a baker! yet do we feel the imagination at all violated when we read the "true ballad," where King Cophetua wooes the beggar maid?
Pauperism, pauper, poor man, are expressions of pity, but pity